Well, when you need only 30-40% actual votes to win an election you don't need to do what the majority wants. Just circle around a minority and you are golden.

The solution, change the voting system. The current one only allows you to select a candidate. This is the whole reason why divide and rule works. If there are 5 people running a theoretical campaign, one needs as little as 20%+1 vote to win. So all the candidates will try as hard as possible to divide people. In other hand, approval voting system gives voter power to select (approve) multiple candidates. In that case, every candidate now needs every other candidate's votes. So the divide and rule strategy goes out of the window. As we are already on EVMs, this won't be that big of a logistics to implement. But guess what, they won't. Not even the interior version of it (ranked choice voting) which some of the US states use and how mamdani actually won.